If your goal is to hide the original data that was hashed then SHA on small amounts of data is not a good idea.
If your goal is to verify that the data you have matches the hash you have then have faster SHA is good.
 

By making it easy for them to understand the implications of their actions.
Allowing hidden things to happen that cause security issues and then blaming the user is stupid.
Too many systems expect too much of their users.

Skeptics are necessary for all scientific theories. The 'how' of evolution still has missing pieces.
There are people that are skeptical of gravity, and that's a really good thing.

Life is a self correcting web, fuck it up and a few species die, the rest quickly adapt.
You put pressure on a species and it adapts..or it dies out and another species gets a chance to adapt.

With all the plastics we're dumping in the sea, it probably won't take long for species to adapt to either digest it, filter it out, or have some way of ridding themselves of it.

Your understanding of infinite is flawed.
"the end of all those infinite 9s"? what end? it's infinite.
infinite doesn't just mean really, really, really big. it's infinite, it has no end.

...then it wouldn't be a long walk.
unless the reference to 'long' is a reference to the time taken for the walk.

Yep, this idea has been had many times. FOAF is the most popular.

But freedom is a hard sell.The reason myspace and facebook etc. get such large users bases is specifically related to the walled garden way they operate. If I get a myspace account then if it to be useful I have to make all my friends get myspace accounts too. If they could follow what I was doing without getting such an account then they probably wouldn't bother.

I don't think deleting your Myspace account will do anything. They already have your data and you already agreed to allow them to redistribute it, just because you delete your account doesn't mean they have to delete your data. Facebook has the same agreement and will get to selling your data to the highest bidder sooner or later.

It's amazing that people will trade the labours of their mind for mere web hosting.

well you just look for it in your distribution's package reposito...oh you're running windows..Microsoft really should have something like that.
I guess they'll get around to it when they're done with all those important 3D desktop effects.

That other language was called "Go!" not "Go" and yeah everyone ignored him because nobody had heard of his language anyway.

Just maths ey?
Yeah, because maths is so easy. Being a great mathematician is no where near as awesome as being a great composer. :P

Human beings are great at pattern matching, it's what we do, it's all that we do. We aren't special.

The sooner we get used to that the less time and effort we'll waste fighting over stupid things.

- jessta

I always thought this was about the fact that the bad guy always draws first(because he's evil and wants to kill people) and the good guy always wins.
The good guy can't draw first because he's supposed to be avoiding the conflict and trying not to kill anyone.

and then the researchers discovered the Halting problem and pretended it didn't exist.

My guess is that it's a bot net becoming active.
The countries with higher traffic during that period are countries that are widely known to have high bot net activity they are also more likely to have server bot net activity, which is why they don't stripe like the over countries.

The stripes are likely day/night where infected PCs are turned off when not in use.